Lord Porter of Spalding (Con)

I rise briefly to take part in this debate. Before doing so, I draw Members’ attention to my register of interest: I am a vice-president of the Local Government Association and a director of a fully privately funded affordable housing provider that actively encourages its tenants to buy their homes after five, 10, 15 or 20 years. It is called Rentplus and it does what it says on the tin: you rent at a discounted price and you buy at a discounted price. I work for somebody in the private sector who preaches the possibility that home ownership should be within everybody’s reach. I will support my noble friend by going through the Division Lobby with him when he chooses to divide, but I will not agree on the reason. My reason is not that the Government are being unreasonable in setting the numbers they have chosen. Putting numbers on a piece of paper is a big mistake when talking about property markets; they are so varied in so many places for so many different reasons that it is better to put a percentage figure. I disagreed with what the last Government did by increasing the discounts to such a level that only really rewarded avaricious grandchildren, not the hard-working tenants who had occupied their homes for a long time. A number of elderly people were pressured into buying their houses for a capital sum that would go to their grandchildren. That should not have happened unless that grandchild had lived with those grandparents. But, as my noble friend Lord Fuller said, right to buy is probably the single biggest piece of social mobility legislation enacted since the war. It enabled a million families to gain access to capital who never had done in the history of their families. I do not think anybody has done any work, but somebody should do, on how many businesses were set up in this country by people who could leverage capital they had not previously had access to. For a number of reasons—I think about our care sector, as people need access to capital to be able to pay to have care nowadays—this country would fall apart without it. We should not lose sight of the fact that just over a million homes were lost to councils through right to buy, but 2 million homes were lost to councils through propositions put forward by the Tony Blair Government. Out of the 4 million homes that used to be in council ownership pre-1980, 1 million, so 25%, were lost through right to buy and 2 million—50%—were lost through LSVT. Councils such as my own were summoned to the Government Offices for the Regions to explain why they were not transferring their homes out. So this is not a tribal issue between the red team and the blue team; it is a proposition about whether we believe most people in this country aspire to be home owners. Clearly we do—I think all of us across the Chamber believe that—but do we also believe that people should be able to live in a safe, secure, decent, affordable home even if their financial circumstances mean that they are unable to do that completely unaided at the time they need it? Right to buy is a good thing, but the right to build is the most important thing, and I agree that the Labour Government are right this time round to allow councils to keep 100% of the receipts, which would otherwise have been lost to the Treasury. Who wants to give money to the Treasury? It is much better for it to be spent locally. If the Labour Government had said that the discounts would be set at a local level by local councils to stimulate demand but not to reward avaricious grandchildren, I would not be going through the Division Lobbies tonight. But that is not what they have said; they have said, “Whitehall knows best. We’ll set an arbitrary figure that’ll have no bearing to the marketplace in a year or two’s time”.